Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

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The publishers aren't the problem, and the authors aren't the problem. We the readers are the problem. Seriously. Let me explain.

I have to admit, when I saw "LeCun, Hinton, in Nature" I thought "That must be an important article, I need to read it". I haven't read every single paper by LeCun or Hinton. The Nature name affected me. That's why it's rational to publish there.

There's still no effective alternative to the journal system to identify what papers are important to read. There have been attempts, Google Scholar and Citeseer for example.

A voting system like HackerNews wouldn't work, because Geoff Hinton's vote should count for a lot more than my vote. Pagerank solved that problem for web pages (a link from Yahoo indicates more value than a link from my blog). How can scientific publication move to such a system?

> How can scientific publication move to such a system?

Complete amatuer speculation: Scientists' professional societies could create elite, free, online journals, with a limited number of articles per month (to ensure only the best are published there), openly stating that they intend these to be the new elite journals in their respective fields.

PLoS has tried to do that, with journals like PLoS Biology.

Hypothetically, AAAS is in the best position to pull something like this off, but as the publishers of Science, they're sadly very committed to preserving the status quo...

PLoS is actually a pretty nice success. It's more than an experiment at this point.

Things are moving in that direction. Some of the top statistics journals encourage authors to put their papers on ArXiv, for example.[1] Creating "new elite journals" takes much more time than you'd think, though. I work in economics, and I'm aware of two new open access journals that are very good but definitely not comparable to Science or Nature (or, really, the equivalents of Science and Nature in econ). One is five years old and the other is ten, and they've probably got as high a reputation now as they're likely to ever have.

[1]: http://www.imstat.org/publications/eaccess.htm

People are trying to accomplish precisely that: it's called eLife. Wellcome Trust, HHMI and the Max-Planck-Society are backing it; adoption is moderately successful.

So there's hope!

Karma could be used to weight votes.

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